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Salam: What would happen if Tea Partiers ran America?

By REIHAN SALAM
- Slate

June 19, 2014

NEW YORK – What exactly does the tea party movement want?

If every Republican squish in Congress were booted out of office and replaced by a doughty defender of our constitutional freedoms, what kind of laws would this purer, more authentically conservative GOP pass, and which government programs would it dismantle? If FDR gave us the New Deal and LBJ gave us the Great Society, how would President Rand Paul or President Ted Cruz seek to transform American life?

No one really knows. But after the shocking defeat of Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va, it is nevertheless useful to think through what a Teatopia might look like.

One reason it is challenging to describe Teatopia is that Republicans who identify with the tea party movement are diverse in their ideological inclinations. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., is an idiosyncratic libertarian in the Ron Paul mold, and he has never met a U.S. military intervention he’s liked. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a modernizing reformer type who wants to make government smaller and smarter, and he’s a flag-waving believer in a Pax Americana foreign policy. Some tea party conservatives favor limiting immigration, including Dave Brat, the economist who vaulted to fame by besting Cantor. Others, including the deep-pocketed Koch brothers, believe that welcoming immigrants of all shapes, sizes and skill levels is a bedrock principle of Americanism. If the tea party ever seized power, perhaps its members would, like founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, settle their disagreements in a series of duels.

Deep divisions notwithstanding, there are a number of principles that unite the movement. The most important of them is a devotion to subsidiarity, which holds that power should rest as close to ordinary people as possible.

In practice, this leads tea party conservatives to favor voluntary cooperation among free individuals over local government, local government over state government, and state government over the federal government. Teatopia would in some respects look much like our own America, only the contrasts would be heightened. California and New York, with their dense populations and liberal electorates, would have even bigger state governments that provide universal pre-K, a public option for health insurance and generous funding for mass transit. They might even have their own immigration policies, which would be more welcoming toward immigrants than the policies the country as a whole would accept.

More conservative states, meanwhile, would compete to go furthest and fastest in abandoning industrial-era government. Traditional urban school districts would become charter districts, in which district officials would provide limited oversight while autonomous networks of charter schools would make the decisions about how schools are run day-to-day. Parents would be given K through 12 spending accounts, which could be spent on the services provided by local public schools and on a range of other educational services, from online tutoring to apprenticeships designed to provide young people with marketable skills.

On transportation, Teatopia would borrow from governments in Australia and New Zealand, where roads are owned and operated by public road enterprises that make spending and investment decisions on the basis of consumer demand rather than political imperatives. Social welfare policies would be crafted with local sensibilities in mind, and they’d have a different character in communitarian Utah than they would in libertarian Texas.

The goal of tea party federalism is not for states to serve as “laboratories of democracy,” in which programs that work in Houston are eventually adopted across the country by dint of federal pressure.

State governments wouldn’t serve as a kind of minor-league farm system for the big leagues in Washington, D.C. Rather, the goal would be for different states to offer different visions of the good life. Citizens would vote with their feet in favor of the social-democratic societies that would emerge in Vermont and the Bay Area or the laissez-faire societies that would emerge in large stretches of the Mountain West.

The tea party movement sees this approach as the best way to honor and reflect what you might call America’s normative diversity – a diversity that has less to do with ethnicity and race and more to do with the virtues that we as communities want to cultivate in our children, and that we want to see reflected in our collective institutions.

• Salam, a Slate columnist, also writes for the National Review. He is the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

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